From Conquest to Deportation The North Caucasus under Russian Rule [Hardcover]

This book is about a region on the fringes of empire, which neither Tsarist Russia, nor the Soviet Union, nor in fact the Russian Federation, ever really managed to control. Starting with the nineteenth century, it analyses the state's various strategies to establish its rule over populations highly resilient to change imposed from outside, who frequently resorted to arms to resist interference in their religious practices and beliefs, traditional customs, and ways of life.

Jeronim Perovic offers a major contribution to our knowledge of the early Soviet era, a crucial yet overlooked period in this region's troubled history. During the 1920s and 1930s, the various peoples of this predominantly Muslim region came into contact for the first time with a modernising state, demanding not only unconditional loyalty but active participation in the project of 'socialist transformation'. Drawing on unpublished documents from Russian archives, Perovi? investigates the changes wrought by Russian policy and explains why, from Moscow's perspective, these modernization attempts failed, ultimately prompting the Stalinist leadership to forcefully exile the Chechens and other North Caucasians to Central Asia in 1943-4.

Foreword: What this book is about
1 Introduction: Russia and the peoples of the North Caucasus
1.1 Identifying problems areas in the historiography on the North Caucasus
1.2 The establishment of Russian rule
1.3 Objectives and methods of this study


2 Conquest and resistance
2.1 Russia and the North Caucasus in the eighteenth century
2.2 Chechen idiosyncrasies
2.3 Life and death on the 'Line'
2.4 The 'Great Caucasus War' and Shamil's imamate
2.5 Russia's victory and historiographical controversies


3 Musa Kundukhov and the tragedy of mass emigration
3.1 Emigration and colonization
3.2 Between two worlds: General Musa Kundukhov
3.3 Kundukhov and the Chechens
3.4 Emigration and the aftermath

l#